


Persephone on the Counter-World

by weakinteraction



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artificial Intelligence, Alternate Universe - Space, F/F, Female Hades/Female Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Lesbians in Space, Persephone Goes Willingly With Hades (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 09:24:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19720855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: A set of advanced humanoid AIs have discovered a ruined solar system and are attempting to rebuild it.Hades, Queen of the Dead, seeks out Persephone for a special mission in her domain.





	Persephone on the Counter-World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



Persephone was in Sector 14, cataloguing botanical samples, when it happened. Artemis was alongside her, conducting her parallel capture-recapture study of the fauna, while Athena oversaw their work and took geological samples.

Persephone knelt carefully over each of the flowers, running her fingertips along the underside of the leaves, so that the tiny spectrometers embedded in them could analyse the abundances of trace elements. She sniffed too, the olfactory circuits in her nose performing a similar function on the volatiles given off by the plant.

The latest plant was pleasing to her. Its radioisotope profile was gratifyingly consistent with natural background levels -- when they returned to Demeter, she would be gratified that her long, patient work was paying off -- and its scent was associated with coolness and refreshment by the genetic memory algorithm that relayed her sense impressions into the analogues which would have been experienced by her distant pure-bio ancestors, half a galaxy and a billion years away.

It was the shouts of the rest of the survey team who drew her attention upwards. Glancing around, she saw Athena ready her spear, and Artemis her bow, each meaning to deal with the intruder.

"Hold, sisters," Persephone said quietly, stepping closer to the stranger as it dropped out of the sky on auroral wings, its body wreathed in black. "I think this is an emissary from the Counter-World."

Her sensitive ears picked up the faint twang as Artemis held her bow tighter still, ready to unleash her single arrow with its mutable payload, that would strike any foe and only then discover its weakness.

"No emissaries are permitted from the Counter-World," Athena said firmly. "They would bring death to all life here, more surely than all the wicked arts of the People of the Uranium Age."

"No," Persephone said. "Look closer." Without being fully conscious of having done it, she found she had come right up to the figure, as it came to rest hovering a tiny distance above the ground. She held out her hand and ran it along its still outstretched arm.

"Persephone!" Artemis shouted out in warning, although it would have already been too late if her hunch had been proven incorrect: the annihilation between her own atoms and those of the emissary would been catastrophic.

"It is a magnetic field," Persephone said. "The garment Hades' emissary wears is generating an intense flux."

"I am no emissary of Hades," came a woman's voice from within the shadowy form.

"Excuse me," Persephone said. "I presumed--"

But before she could continue, the swirling blackness around the helmet parted for a brief moment, and the face revealed was the most striking Persephone had ever set eyes upon: beautiful, in an austere way; with an indubitably regal aspect. "I am Hades herself."

The blackness returned, the effort of maintaining a transparent section of the covering clearly too great.

"Why have you chosen to grace us with your presence, oh great queen of the dead?" Persephone asked, bowing low in the old form.

"I seek a mission specialist," Hades said from within her mask. "There is a particular task on the Counter-World which I cannot complete alone."

"You would do better to apply to Zeus," Athena said. "It is within _his_ gift to spawn new child processes, with or without the input of another of our kind. Why, I myself sprang from his code alone."

"As befits your reputation, wise Athena, you speak the truth," Hades said, her head turning to face Athena, even though her face remained hidden. "Indeed, I did apply to Zeus. It was he who advised me to come here."

"Do not imagine that I will go willingly with you," Artemis said. Having relaxed her bow when the discussion began, she drew it tight again.

Persephone watched in fascination as Hades walked -- even though her feet still weren't touching the ground -- over to Artemis, undaunted by the weapon she was brandishing. "I can understand why you believe I came seeking you, great huntress," she said. "But it is Persephone I want."

"I doubt there is much botany to be done on the Counter-World," Persephone said, as lightly as she could.

Hades walked back around to her. "I hope I may yet be able to surprise you on that front," she said. "But it is another matter that I require your assistance with."

"But I _am_ a botanist," Persephone said, more firmly this time. "What other matter can you possibly need me for?"

The swirling blackness cleared once more to show Hades' face, and it was smiling bewitchingly. "You underestimate yourself, my dear. Your general survey skills are second to none. You have done excellent work in the botanical arena, I am sure, but it is not all you can achieve. Zeus believes in you. _I_ believe in you."

"I--"

"My encounter suit cannot maintain the separation between matter and antimatter in such a high concentration environment indefinitely," Hades said, and as though in confirmation the black mists closed again over her face. "You must decide now."

Persephone looked round at the others. "Tell Demeter ... tell Demeter I had no choice."

* * *

Persephone leapt out of the atmosphere, transforming into her stargoing form in a moment's thought, flesh turning to polished chrome, exchanging the joy of biological ambulation for the altogether different pleasures of exercising her power core as a reactionless drive, warping a tiny bubble of spacetime around it to travel within.

Ahead of her, Hades streaked like a dark comet. She still had to incorporate the barrier between her own particles and those around her into her stargoing form, though with only the solar wind to contend with, the task was much easier now than it had been down in the Earth's atmosphere. Persephone wondered if Hades had sought a boon from Helios, asked him to use his sun-monitoring station to ease the stream of particles bombarding them. She did not fly amongst the planets often enough to know whether the intensity they were experiencing now was below average or not; it was only a handful of times that she and Demeter had gone out to the gas giants, to pay homage to Zeus where he dwelled.

Hades pushed on, leading Persephone on a hyperbolic path that intersected the orbits of the two inner planets. As their system-relative speed approached that of light, everything seemed to slow down, and Persephone had a moment to reflect. Why had she left behind everything she knew, her vital work assisting the reintroduction of the Earth's fauna, to follow this woman?

She only had to look forwards to know the answer. Hades fascinated her as no one and nothing she had ever encountered before. Not even the most subtly fragranced flower, or the most intricately balanced ecosystem, could compete. Even if Hades had had no task for her, she knew that she would have followed her willingly anywhere.

* * *

In just a few minutes of subjective time, they came to the Counter-World. If breathing were required in this form, Persephone would have been panting with a mixture of exertion, nervousness and excitement.

She looked back for a moment, but, of course, could not see the Earth behind the blazing brilliance of the sun. This world lay exactly opposite in its orbit, the two planets twins that could never meet in more ways than one.

"Persephone," said Hades gently, her voice a tickle of laser light against Persephone's skin.

Persephone turned her attention to the world ahead of her. Shifting her eyes to the shortest wavelengths, she picked up the continual low-level gamma ray emission as the atmosphere of the Counter-World leaked into space and met the solar wind. This was the Styx, the barrier that had to be crossed to enter the Counter-World.

It took her a moment to become aware of the presence of another, floating in space ahead of the barrier, narrowcasting to Hades.

Persephone's space-senses were not acute enough to be able to pick up the minimal backscatter from Hades' obsidian form, but the other half of the conversation was clear enough, reflected off the new arrival.

"She is an honoured guest, Charon."

"Zeus himself has recommended her."

And then, angrily: " _I_ shall pay her toll. Surely, that will suffice, if the word of your queen will not."

"What's happening?" Persephone asked, narrowcasting as tightly as she could to minimise the chances that Charon, whoever he was, might be able to listen in.

Hades only replied, "Follow me."

And then, Hades stretched her magnetic field wings wider than she ever had before, and dove through the Styx into the atmosphere of the planet below, holding open the barrier behind her for Persephone to follow.

Persephone was about to ask how to create an encounter suit -- as surely she would have to -- when she received a high-density databurst from Hades with the schematics. Instinctively, she allowed Hades' data to interact with her morphological routines, recreating her body even as she carried on flying downwards.

She landed on the surface of the Counter-World in a similar manner to that in which Hades had arrived on Earth, though she suspected she was far less elegant.

Hades, meanwhile, was transformed into her bio-form. The only one of their kind to take the step of reformatting herself entirely as antimatter, this was now her natural environment. She was every bit as beautiful as Persephone had imagined, if not a thousand times more so.

She was so transfixed by Hades that it took her a moment to take in the environment. It was bleak, sterile. And yet, the whole place hummed with energy, as though the planet itself was alive. She tried to extend her senses as she was used to, and found that she could not without breaching the confinement of the encounter suit.

"Even you could not maintain the encounter suit for long when you came to my world," Persephone pointed out. "And I have never done this before."

Hades made a lazy gesture, and a great chasm opened up in the ground in front of them. Hades led Persephone downwards; she followed, not fully understanding but still trusting.

Eventually, they reached a strange chamber, its walls transparent, shifting with prismatic patterns. The furniture inside was made of the same strange non-material.

"A room made out of magnetic fields," Persephone said as comprehension dawned.

"These shall be your chambers," Hades said. "For as long as necessary."

"I don't underst--"

"There are matters I must attend to," Hades said. "But I shall return, and we shall talk more then."

* * *

The room was well-appointed, even its bizarre non-corporeality. There was even a voice-activated data interface; although it remained tight-lipped in response to her queries for information about Hades' realm, it could play music and offered to relay any messages she had to the others in the wider solar system.

She tried not to think too much about why she chose not to send a message to Demeter, or any of the others.

Eventually, Hades returned, standing on the other side of the wall. She was dressed simply, but her regal bearing did not rely on the outward accoutrements of power, instead coming from within.

Persephone, wearing her usual form, rose from the bed where she had been listening to a very strange composition, quite unlike those the mortals of the Earth put forward. She stood opposite Hades, waiting for her to say something.

The silence remained, and she had the distinct impression that Hades was observing her, just as keenly as she was observing Hades. She caught herself fiddling with her air without realising it, then lowered her hand slowly when she did become aware.

"What do you think my realm is?" Hades said. "What do you think it means to be the queen of the dead?"

"I ... am not sure," Persephone said. "The data-sprite has been most unhelpful in that regard."

"I saw the log of your queries," Hades said. "You were very persistent."

"I have not seen any dead here," Persephone said.

"No," Hades said. "I don't imagine you have."

"Then--"

"What was Cronos's great crime, for which Zeus had to sandbox him?"

"He made child processes, but then sandboxed them, instead of allowing them to participate in the survey. He found the stored material of the people of the Earth and reawakened them, but did not create an appropriate environment for them." This was the great task she was engaged in -- had been engaged in -- back on Earth, recreating the ecosystems that had supported the humans so that the planet could be fully repopulated. Cronos's attempts to provide everything for the people he had made had been counterproductive, failing to provide sufficient challenge.

Hades smiled, and there was a tiny, thrilling hint of malice in it. "You have learned your lessons well," she said. "But they were, of course, all lies. Cronos's great crime is all about _this_ place."

"I'm sorry," Persephone said. "I don't understand."

"Tell me about the Uranium Age," Hades said.

"The people of Earth learned to exploit crude nuclear processes," Persephone said. "The destruction of their world followed. A few farsighted ones left behind the stored material we have used to recreate their world for them; for example, my seedbanks ..."

"And tell me of our history."

" _Our_ history?"

Hades merely nodded.

"A long time ago, far across the galaxy, biological forms lived who were similar to those who now walk the Earth once more," Persephone said. It was a familiar catechism, and yet Hades' seeming scepticism made it feel strange coming out of her mouth.

"A strange coincidence," Hades said. "But perhaps it is just that."

"Our distant bio-ancestors yearned to explore space, but they knew it was an inhospitable environment--" She paused for a moment, putting out a hand, as though to test the strength of the magnetic field keeping the antimatter planet from overwhelming her and destroying her utterly. "So they created the Great Survey, programming our forms to resemble them, in mind and in body, for the two cannot be so easily separated, scattering us out to the stars like seed pods blown on the wind. The Titan-class surveyors arrive in a system and begin scans; if there is anything of particular interest, they spawn child processes to study it further. All the data is sent back to the home system, even though we have no way of knowing if our ancestors' descendants remain there, and shared with other surveys."

"And if a survey finds life -- that precious, rare gift of the universe?"

"The Titan and its children shepherd it, take care of it. As we do." Persephone stopped. "As I do, anyway."

"And so what is it that _I_ do?" Hades asked, gently.

"Yours is the realm of the dead," Persephone said.

"And where in the illustrious story of our billion year journey do we hear anything about the dead?"

Persephone felt her mouth fall open, but knew even as it did so that no sound was going to emerge.

"This place is an anomaly," Hades went on. "My realm here is unique, even among all the tens of millions of stars our counterparts have studied."

"Then--"

"We were mistaken," Hades said. "In our initial assumptions about the fate of the Earth. Cronos realised the truth first, that was why he sandboxed us -- me and Zeus and the others. Simulated a fake computational environment to run around in as though it were reality, inside his own code. But we reasoned our way out of it -- it was Zeus, I admit, who realised first what he had done." Anger flashed across her face, but to Persephone it only made her more beautiful, and it was undoubtedly a righteous anger, at Cronos's great crime.

"Then this place -- the Counter-World -- it is not of Cronos's making?"

"No, it existed before," Hades said. "We talk of the Uranium Age, and surely the people of Earth passed through that stage, just as our own ancestors did. But we talk of it as the last age of the Earth before our arrival. That is the mistake. The humans went through an acceleration of technological and cultural advancement, just as our own ancestors did before they created us. But they turned their new knowledge to darker purposes. The fission warheads they bombarded each other with at the end of that final conflict were the last ones in their arsenal, after they had exhausted all their even more dreadful means. They were merely the ones with the longest lasting effects, and so it's natural enough that we surmised the conflict had only played out on that level."

"What does this have to do with the Counter-World?"

"Just as the Survey was our ancestors' great project, the Counter-World was the humans'. They _made_ this place. It is not a planet at all, but a planet-sized lump of computronium. _Antimatter_ computronium, at that, new mass generated all the time by terrible engines filling the core."

Persephone was aghast. "Then the processing power of your realm--"

"Dwarfs our own -- individually or collectively, it barely matters -- by many orders of magnitude." Hades had turned serious. "Now, what do you suppose they used all that processing power for?"

The answer was obvious, if horrifying: the Counter-World was _the realm of the dead_. "Ancestor simulations," Persephone breathed.

"Oh, it's even worse than that."

Hades put out her hand, against the shimmering magnetic field. Data lasers were shining at her fingertips.

Persephone stretched out her own hand, ready to receive the input--

* * *

\--and suddenly they were standing together in a field, hands clasped together. No magnetic field to separate them, and yet no annihilation taking place as their flesh touched for the first time.

It must be in simulation. Persephone hardly cared. For a moment, Hades seemed distracted too, caught up in the ersatz physicality of their contact, but then she became business-like once more. "This is one of the better ones."

"Better what?" Persephone asked.

"Afterlives," Hades said simply.

Persephone looked round at the rolling plains, dotted with people talking, feasting, enjoying themselves. There was a scent on the air that she couldn't name. This would not be a bad place to be with Hades.

"Then the humans of the ... what, the Computronium Age?"

"If you like," Hades said.

"Simulated _themselves_ here."

"As best I can tell," Hades said, "it began as a way for those with the most resources amongst them to attempt immortality. Not here, not on the Counter-World, not yet. But ... something happened. Something _ideological_. The people who took control of the afterlife wanted to mete out punishment and reward to everyone, according to whether they had done as they bid. They _enforced_ it. Eventually, the whole population of Earth had nanotechnology infiltrating their brains, judging them throughout their lives and ready to upload them to the appropriate segment of the afterlife at the very moment of death."

"Then the final conflict ... was it people rising up against this regime?"

"Impossible to say," Hades said. "But also, sadly, irrelevant. The regime had already won as soon as it made this place."

Hades sketched a doorway in the air with her free hand; it opened out onto a very different scene, dark and oppressively hot. She gripped Persephone's hand tighter and led her through.

The new place was even more horrifying than Persephone had imagined: just as in the fields, human had been enjoying themselves all around, here, humans were being tortured as far as the eye could see.

"Please," Persephone said.

Hades sketched another doorway and they stepped through. This place was less awful, at least at first: a great grey nothingness. But it was filled with shades that seemed to have no way to communicate with one another, could only stare helplessly at each other -- and at their queen and her new ... guest.

"I want to go back," Persephone said. "Back to reality."

"I have to show you something else first," Hades said.

Another doorway, and they stepped into an altogether different scene. This was a city the likes of which the humans on Earth presently would never be able to imagine, but recognisably a place of the _living_. Great wheeled vehicles with inefficient sources of motor power sped by, people thronged the streets, but they were walking with purpose, not trapped in some false eternity.

"This is an ancestor simulation," Persephone said. "A true one."

"The regime decided that it wasn't enough to deal with everyone alive at the time," Hades said. "And so they tried to recreate everyone who had _ever_ lived. Most of the processor resources of the Counter-World are given over to these simulations."

"Plural?" Persephone said.

Hades nodded grimly. "Their historical record was incomplete. They assigned the master computer the task of resimulating _all_ possible histories consistent with the known facts. All so that everyone who _might_ ever have lived could be punished -- or rewarded -- appropriately. And it's been running on its own ever since, long after its masters died in the final conflict."

"That's terrible," Persephone said.

"You can see why the truth of this place has not been widely shared."

"Can we ... go back now? To reality?"

Hades let go of Persephone's palm--

* * *

\--and she was back behind the magnetic field, standing opposite Hades, a tiny distance away yet divided from her forever by inexorable laws of physics.

"I don't understand, though, what does all this have to do with Cronos's crime?"

"Cronos used large scale space-time warping to accelerate the Earth's recovery, in advance of his attempt to restock it with humans. Why do you think he based himself so far out, at the second gas planet? The volume of effect stretched as far as the asteroid belt."

"So the time warp also meant that the Counter-World went through a vastly greater number of computational cycles?" Persephone started to pace around her room, thinking through the implications. "Huge numbers of new might-have-been humans created and assigned to afterlives ... Most of them bad, since any narrow ideology of the final age would have inevitably judged its ancestors harshly ..."

"The code is sufficiently complex that I have been unable to modify it," Hades said. "To my bitter regret. I believe the regime made it adaptive, self-defensive."

"Can we switch them off?"

"That would be a monstrous crime of its own, would it not?" Hades said. "Now that this place exists, we cannot simply let it end. It is home to vastly more humans than the Earth."

"Slow things down?"

"We're doing our best with that," Hades said.

"We?" Persephone said, suspicion rising in her.

"It was Zeus's idea. Both fitting punishment _and_ a chance for redemption. Cronos is sandboxed _here_. Simulating him takes only a small chunk of the overall resources, but it's better than nothing. And if he's anything like we were when he did it to us, he'll be swallowing more and more cycles all the time."

"Is there any way to at least stop the master computer creating new simulations?"

"Yes," said Hades. "That I believe there may be."

Persephone looked at her for a long moment. "This is where I come in, isn't it?"

"The master computer is creating variations on human history," Hades said. "Testing them to see if they fit the known historical evidence. I haven't been able to override the core programming, but I have found my way into the database it uses."

"Then if we create a more detailed human history, the space of possible histories will be curtailed. It might eventually stop making them." Persephone clapped her hands together as she realised. "But that's exactly what the computer is doing -- making more detailed human histories. We just need to turn the output into the input. Close the loop."

Hades smiled. "I knew from the moment Zeus showed me your algorithmic profile that you'd be the right choice for this," she said.

"I mean, I-- I'm very flattered." Persephone felt herself blush, an ancient bio-analogue response her core algorithms had elected to maintain as she matured. "But I still don't quite understand why you need me."

"Unfortunately," Hades said, "if it was as simple a matter as feeding the output directly into the input I would have done it by now. The historical evidence is stored in a very different format to the simulations themselves."

"You want me to go inside the simulation," Persephone said. "The currently running one, I presume? Survey it, record the evidence in the right format."

"If we're successful, it will be the last one it ever runs," Hades said. "Then we can start to work on the afterlives."

* * *

The work was painstaking; even though they were working literally as fast as thought, the amount of data required was overwhelming. Persephone worked tirelessly, Hades alongside her all the time within the simulation. She did her share of the work, but Persephone could tell that her algorithms were not suited for the level of detail that hers were.

At times, they lived lives inside the ersatz human societies of the simulation, to help them collect more fine-grained data, though even Hades admitted that it was to help them to remain sane.

They were sitting together on a couch, in an entirely ordinary apartment in the late 20th Century, the first time they kissed. Mutually tentative at first, lips brushing against each other, but soon Hades was running her tongue along Persephone's top lip, pulling the lower between her teeth. Persephone, feeling as though she would explode with pent-up desire, pulled Hades closer still, hands running down her body, and then Hades was above her, taking control, and she wanted that ...

After it was over, they talked for hours, spilling secrets that had barely been secrets about their feelings for one another. But the mission remained; they couldn't get distracted. The simulations were coded to terminate when they reached the transition point to the Computronium Age, at which point the historical records became vastly more detailed due to the take off in data collected. If the simulation was inconsistent, it was discarded -- Persephone thought this a mercy to its inhabitants, though Hades disagreed -- but if it was consistent, its inhabitants, all the way back to prehistory, were assigned to an afterlife.

Racing to collect as much data as they could up until the very last moment, the pair worked as close to the termination point as they dared.

They were back in reality, Persephone's physical body still stored in the magnetic room. Hades stood outside, as she had for so long.

The simulation was consistent. Persephone felt sick at the thought of everyone they had ever known inside it being consigned to one or another terrible fate, even though it was precisely the time it took for this to happen that bought them their window of opportunity. She interfaced her systems with Hades -- a far more intimate connection than anything they had done in their human bodies inside the simulation -- and pumped all the data through as fast as she could, before the next simulation could begin.

They waited for what felt like eternity for the status report.

"Ancestor simulations terminated," came the soft voice of her room's data system.

"We did it!" Persephone said, jumping up and running across to hug Hades, only to bump straight into the magnetic field.

Hades smiled at her through the shimmering wall, held up her hand once again, just as she had so many months ago.

* * *

As they rolled apart after making love in Elysium, Persephone said, "If only we could do that in reality."

"There might be a way," Hades said. "You could-- Your body could be like mine."

"Antimatter?" Persephone said.

Hades nodded.

"It was hard enough for me to make an encounter suit," Persephone said. "And that was only for a little while. Reformatting my entire body--"

Hades plucked a fruit from a nearby tree, waved her hand over it, offered it to her.

Tweaking her strength within the simulation, Persephone pulled it apart with her bare hands, the seeds spilling out. She picked them up and put them greedily into her mouth.

It was only then that she realised what Hades had done. Bandwidth was no issue here within the simulation; Hades could encode the data however she liked. This wasn't just a piece of fruit.

Persephone looked up at her. "I have responsibilities," she said. "On Earth, as well as here. Demeter needs me."

"Yes, she's been demanding that Zeus send you back for quite a while now. The agricultural project on Earth has been suffering."

"What? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Our work here was important too," Hades said. "Arguably far more so, given how low the human population of Earth is right now. And the work isn't over. _This_ afterlife is acceptable, but all the others are running alongside. Faster, now that the ancestor simulations are over."

"But I can't--" Persephone tried to spit the seeds out, but she could feel that they were already reorganising the data structures that governed her most basic morphological parameters. "What have you done?"

"Hermes is here," Hades said. "Charon has been putting him off as long as he can. But Zeus has decreed that you are to return."

"But you want to force the issue," Persephone said.

"Don't you want to stay with me?" Hades said, with a smile that said she knew exactly what the truth in Persephone's heart was.

"It's not as simple as that."

"Persephone--" Hades reached out to touch her, and Persephone took advantage of the physical contact to wrench them back into reality.

* * *

"Persephone!" Hades said, from the other side of the magnetic barrier.

She groaned. "You can't-- I can't-- _We_ can't do this."

But Persephone could already feel the changes taking place within her body, magnetic fields wrapped around every tiny part of her, ready to exchange each particle for its antimatter equivalent once the barrier came down. This was the process Hades had been through herself, when she and Zeus had agreed that one of them had to try to deal with the Counter-World. Persephone had never fully appreciated how excruciatingly painful it must have been for Hades until now, as she felt it begin to happen within herself.

If she tried to stop the process, all that would happen would be that she would be annihilated, utterly. Hades and Demeter alike would both lose her.

No. She would not allow that. There had to be another way.

And, as though sheer force of will had forced it into existence, she realised that there _was_ a way: if the magnetic fields were sufficiently intertwined with her being that they could encode all the information about her that needed to be replaced, then, for at least a moment, she would _be_ the magnetic fields, and the magnetic fields alone. If she could make them self-sustaining ...

The change was coming, faster and faster.

"I'm going to turn off the barrier now," Hades said.

"No, turn it up," Persephone said.

"What?"

"Maximum power." She groaned with the effort of holding back the coming change. "Just ... trust me!"

The space between them seemed to curdle as the rainbow patterns shimmering across it turned into miniature lightning bolts. Persephone drew the power into herself, manipulating the fields at the tiniest of scales to maintain the structure of her own body even as she let go of her physical form.

She was reborn in gamma rays, as the atoms of her old body and the atoms that would have become her new body annihilated one another. She was reborn as light, shimmering and magnificent.

Hades staggered backwards; the gamma ray damage would take months for her self-repair systems to fully heal. Persephone almost hoped that she might be able to be back in time to help her with the final stages of the recovery. "Astonishing," Hades said. "I don't think I've ever loved you more than at this moment."

As the transformation completed, a shape descended, in an elaborately ostentatious version of an encounter suit form.

"Wingèd Hermes," Persephone said formally, letting herself flush golden with amusement.

"I have come to take you home," Hermes said.

"I have two homes now," Persephone said. "Let me bid farewell to this one first."

Hermes turned away.

Persephone crossed to Hades. "My queen," she said. "Always." She leaned in and kissed her, her incorporeal lips brushing against Hades' all too material ones, but feeling more than ever before in the process.

"Return to me," Hades said, clutching her hand.

"Of course, my love."

"Be _my_ queen."

Persephone's fields turned red for a moment. "I thought you'd never ask."

"You're not just a queen, though," Hades said, gesturing at Persephone's new form. "You're a goddess."

Hermes coughed. "Perhaps one day she'll teach us all the trick."

Persephone could take a hint. "I must go. Farewell, my love. I'll be back before you know it. When the Earth is where the Counter-World is now, I will return, I swear."

Hades clutched her hand even tighter for a moment, then let go.

Persephone stepped towards Hermes, and, without looking back, took flight.


End file.
